


That I Live and You are Gone

by talboys



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Chairs, Gen, His Last Vow Spoilers, John's chair, LSD, Sherlock Holmes and Drug Use, Sherlock Series 3 Spoilers, The Sign of Three Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:45:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talboys/pseuds/talboys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>**Spoilers for the end of The Sign of Three and His Last Vow in case you are avoiding them**</p><p>Sherlock had to move John’s chair on John and Mary’s wedding night. </p><p> </p><p>A companion piece to “Mind Altering” (if you’d like to know more of the background on Sherlock’s drug habits and how Mycroft was involved), but it stands well on its own.</p><p>As a warning and explanation for the rating, though, this story does contain explicit psychedelic drug usage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That I Live and You are Gone

The flat was oppressively silent.

Sherlock appreciated quiet, relished it even. It was more conducive to thinking than pointless noise. But this, this absolute silence, was just as distracting and irritating as shrill voices. Both frayed his patience to shreds.

221B Baker Street had never been a place of silence. There had always been Mrs. Hudson scuttling about and more often than not stopping in. There had been a steady flow of clients through the sitting room. And there had been John. Recently, of course, there had been John and Mary. The flat had never been quite so noisy, in a way, as it had been in the last months of wedding planning.

But now: silence.

Sherlock frowned even though there was no one there to notice it. He ticked through all of the people in his life who could properly distract him from the increasingly unendurable lack of noise: Mrs. Hudson had reserved a room at the hotel and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. John and Mary certainly weren’t coming back or leaving their wedding early.

There wasn’t anyone he could call – Lestrade and Molly were staying at the hotel as well. There was no one else at the Yard who would actually give him an investigation at – Sherlock checked his mobile – 12:20 in the morning. Theoretically, of course, he could always call Mycroft. But – Sherlock shuddered in revulsion – he didn’t think he could face Mycroft’s smug attitude over “not getting involved”.

Sherlock momentarily considered playing the violin simply for the company of the sound. But then he remembered: in his haste to leave the wedding, he’d left it with the band. He cursed. No doubt Mrs. Hudson would bring it back with her tomorrow, but until then he would be bereft of the distraction of composition.

Annoyed at his own carelessness of leaving his violin and by how everyone else was otherwise busy, Sherlock stomped rather more loudly than he would normally to his bedroom to discard his frankly ridiculous morning suit. Seeing the jacket crumpled on the floor gave him a brief burst of satisfaction and his dressing gown made him feel slightly more himself. He sighed in satisfaction and toed off his glossy pumps.

Without his violin, without John or Mary, and without any sort of audience, what was there to do? He wasn’t tired; sleep would be impossible. His mind felt uncomfortably unsettled and restless. Sustained focus felt frighteningly out of reach. He tried to relax into his mind palace, looking for anything that would serve as a distraction, but all of the doors seemed to slam of their own accord, stranding him in the empty foyer.

Feeling very unlike himself, Sherlock wandered back to the sitting room. Now would be the ideal moment for a cigarette or at least something centering and engaging. Something to fully occupy his mind and distract him from how upsetting he found the silent flat to be. Sherlock was briefly surprised at just how much the emptiness bothered him – he’d just spent two years largely alone, after all. But yet, now that he’d been reminded of what it was to spend time with others, it ached to have the feeling snatched away.

In fact, thinking about it, he’d been feeling quite unstable all day. It was as though all of the sentiment of the wedding, combined with the adrenalin crash that came after solving a case, had pushed him slightly off of his axis. Perhaps he was feverish? He checked his forehead, but it was resolutely normal to the touch. The stable center that his life rotated around was wobbly, though, and the feeling was deeply disconcerting.

What to do about it, though…

A thought suddenly struck Sherlock as he saw the old Persian slipper next to the fireplace poker: he may not have cigarettes, but he did have something else.

Feeling excitement bubble in his chest, he dug his fingers into the toe of the slipper until they found what he remembered: a breath mint carefully wrapped in plastic. He stared at it with a slight sense of wonder. He’d nicked it from Scotland Yard three months ago when Sally had let him into an evidence locker to examine a murder victim’s overcoat. There had been a tin of them on the shelf and even if the tag hadn’t identified them, he would have known: each mint contained a dose of lysergic acid diethylamide.

There really hadn’t been a reason to steal one (Scotland Yard wouldn’t notice one dose missing – they would only assume that someone has miscounted). Perhaps it had been because Sally had spent the whole morning glaring at him when Lestrade wasn’t looking. Perhaps it had been the fact that Mary had called John halfway through the investigation to talk about the flowers for the wedding (it was an _emergency_ , she had said). Perhaps he had done it because it would have riled Mycroft if he’d ever found out.  

Sherlock looked at the small white mint between his fingers. It had been a very long time since he’d last taken LSD; not since Mycroft had discovered his experiments with heroin and had shipped him off to rehabilitation. Strangely, even though he’d been clean since then (except for nicotine and the odd drink) his brain felt as though it was begging for the all-encompassing distraction that it would bring.

His mind raced through the calculations: no one would find out if he took it. Mrs. Hudson wouldn’t be home until lunch time at the earliest. Mycroft wouldn’t want to voluntarily get involved in post-wedding sentiment – he’d stay away for several days. John and Mary would be enjoying their wedding night too much to try to check in with him. No one else would interrupt him. Physically, it was not a dangerous drug and he only had a small dose; there shouldn’t be any medical complications that would alert anyone to the fact that he had taken it.

He could get away with it.

Sherlock felt his pulse quicken with a familiar thrill of anticipation. Carefully, he unwrapped the mint from the cling film that had protected it and gently placed it on his tongue. It tasted, unsurprisingly, just like a mint. He dissolved it, rather than chewing it, by rubbing it against the roof of his mouth with his tongue, letting the sharp taste of peppermint overwhelm his senses.

Once it was gone, he settled into his chair to wait for it to take effect.  

It was a common misconception of hallucinogenic drugs, Sherlock mused, to think that they made you see pink elephants parading around the room. He preferred to conceptualize the effect as making the mind think in a different dimension. It was what had initially attracted him to synthesizing it while at university, this ability to make him understand things and make connections that he wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. It wouldn’t make the silence of the flat disappear of course – there were other drugs that could do that, but the effort of getting his hands on them wasn’t worth the increased risk of Mycroft interfering in his life – but it would reconfigure it. He’d read the studies: in fact, there were several promising trials currently in process to test the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on PTSD and anxiety. If nothing else, then, this should help him think in order to restore some of the balance to his life.  

Sherlock became suddenly aware of his tongue. The tongue was such an odd muscle. How strange was it that something could fill an entire mouth and yet most humans spent their days blissfully unaware of it? Experimentally, Sherlock shifted his tongue, allowing the rest of his mouth to feel it. Usually it was the tongue that felt the rest of the mouth, but this time his gums told him about the fuzzy top and his bottom teeth attested to the sinewy, stringy base of it.

Sherlock smiled and felt his tongue flatten against the roof of his mouth: it had started. He swallowed a couple of times to force the vague nausea back down.

His hands felt strangely yet pleasantly connected with the smooth arms of the chair. He traced a finger in small circles, relishing how the fabric felt different to every millimeter of fingertip.

Sherlock closed his eyes and breathed deeply, enjoying the electric yellow geometric patterns that the light wove on the inside of his eyelids as he continued to slowly stroke the chair’s arm. How relaxing just to sit here and breathe.

The patterns on his eyelids were interestingly softened; no sharp angles and intriguingly rounded corners. It reminded him slightly of the wallpaper that Mrs. Hudson had so unwisely chosen for the flat. An interesting thought occurred to him: that wallpaper would be interesting to look at while under the effects of LSD.

Sherlock opened his eyes and turned his head to stare at the wall. The wallpaper was absolutely brilliant. In the dim light, the black portions seemed to twist and undulate slightly as though he were watching ivy grow on a time lapse film. Sherlock smiled as he watched one of the dark tendrils reach out and join with the patch of ivy next to it. Maybe it wasn’t ivy – maybe they were flowers.

Yes, Sherlock decided, definitely flowers. He was watching monochromatic flowers bloom in remarkable depth. It was like being in a garden and stopping to examine every bloom under a magnifying glass in the hopes of discovering something intriguing. Squinting his eyes slightly – he smiled again – he could even see bees zipping from flower to blooming flower. The yellow paint from the smiley face melted across the wall and turned the flowers into deconstructed and charming oxeye daisies mounted on a black velvet stand.

Perhaps he ought to thank Mrs. Hudson for her taste in interior decoration; the wallpaper was proving remarkably fascinating.

Content with the complexity of the wallpaper, he allowed his gaze to wander slowly around the room, seeking other interesting things to look at. As he did so, he realized that the dose that he’d taken hadn’t been particularly strong. It had been a long time since he’d last done this, but the effects he was experiencing – combined with the corner of sober thought that he realized still existed in his mind – were similar to the effects of approximately one hundred micrograms.

Not a particularly small dose, actually, but not a strong one. For his rational mind to be overwhelmed he really needed at least three hundred micrograms. A heavy sense of regret flooded his brain: he should have taken two doses from the evidence locker. Scotland Yard wouldn’t have noticed. The small sober corner of his mind patted him soothingly on the shoulder and encouraged him not to dwell on such negative feelings needlessly. This dose was perfectly sufficient for what he wanted to do.

Sherlock nodded and felt the regret slide easily away, leaving a pleasant, elastic and neutral blankness for his mind to explore.

His eyes fell on John’s chair. John’s chair. The crocheted doily from Mrs. Hudson on the back would be interesting to look at, Sherlock thought.

Sherlock stood up slowly, but his body did not object to movement; the nausea from the come-up had mostly abated. He took the two steps necessary to move from his chair to John’s and peered at the fabric. Just as he’d thought, the doily was fascinating. If he stared at a particular spot long enough it looked as though it were crocheting itself in an endless loop. Sherlock watched in fascination as the tiny loops curled, twisted, and tied themselves together in an intricate pattern of knot-work. Maybe in his retirement he would take up crochet.

Sherlock realized suddenly that in order to make such a close examination of the crochet, he’d leaned on John’s chair, his hand gripping the small indentation that John’s elbow had worn into the padding on the arm. Sherlock sank down to his knees to examine the chair.

His fingers reached out to trace the rounded dent from John’s elbow, mirroring what he’d done on his own chair. The fabric was rough with fraying and pilling beneath his fingertip and yet still soft and comfortable. The muted red pattern was comfortable, too. Unlike the doily, where he could see precision and detail, this pattern seemed to smooth out and simply gave off an approachable air. It was like John, Sherlock’s brain supplied.

A rush of sadness flooded his brain and drowned the rational part. Sherlock felt his breathing rate increase. The chair, which had been so easy to sit with, was suddenly cold and remote. Sherlock yanked his fingers away and knelt back on the floor. The chair rose above him in this position and seemed to loom threateningly. The small rational corner of his brain gasped back into existence and raced to sort out what the threat was so that it could be eliminated. His heart beat became clichéd and yet terrifying jungle drums circling around his ear drums.

Sherlock clutched his ears in pain. Even through the noise, he could hear the high-pitched whine of his brain racing under the stress of trying to make the chair unthreatening again. The chair stayed, still menacing, above him. Sherlock forced himself to look down but kept his hands tightly over his ears. His eyes fell to the seat of the chair. The cushion, which Sherlock knew was the same faded fabric, seemed to just be a dark hole. Sherlock blinked and shook his head: the cushion returned.

He exhaled in relief and cautiously pulled his hands away from his ears: the heart-beat drums receded. He needed to make sure not to let negativity dictate the trip.

Then, in horror, Sherlock watched as the cushion on John’s chair began to sink and collapse on itself, recreating the black hole.

Sherlock scrambled backwards, retreating to the safety of his own chair. His rationality finally caught up and he glared at the chair resentfully: how unoriginal for John’s chair to become a black hole now that John was gone.

Sherlock cast his eyes around the room, trying to find something else to focus on in order to bring his trip out of this murky area of fear. He didn’t think that the dose was big enough to have a full-blown “bad trip” with lasting psychological impact, but it was certainly possible to have a deeply unpleasant time.

Somehow, though, nothing caught his eye. The chair seemed magnetic, mocking the knowledge that John wasn’t here and wasn’t going to be coming back. Sherlock flinched as the hole in the seat gaped wider and exposed the endless dark silence that it had been covering.

The chair, Sherlock suddenly realized deep within his stomach, must go.

Even without the filter of LSD, John’s chair was fairly large: too large for one person to move easily. However, one of the curious features of hallucinogenic drugs is that once the mind has decided something _must_ be done, the body eagerly finds a way to comply. Accordingly, Sherlock dragged the chair across the sitting room to the staircase. The chair needed to be well and truly put away, not just pushed out of his eye line or shoved into the bathroom. Sherlock needed not to see John’s chair unless he truly wanted to.

Thus, the only place to put it was John’s former room: upstairs.

Thankful suddenly that Mrs. Hudson was spending the night in a hotel, Sherlock dragged the chair slowly up the stairs, step by step. He had to rest half way and breathe heavily while trying as hard as possible not to look at the cushion on the seat.

His mind screamed for him to keep moving. Carefully grabbing only the back of the chair, Sherlock resumed the slow process of dragging it up the stairs. The noise that the stubby legs made as they banged the edge of each stair felt thunderous, but no one, save for Sherlock, heard it.

With a great deal of visceral satisfaction, Sherlock finally shoved John’s chair into his old room to sit with the rest of the odd items that John hadn’t taken with him (Sherlock knows better than to examine them right now) and slammed the door shut. His mind felt physically lighter as he walked slowly back downstairs, panting slightly; the overwhelming darkness had been safely locked away. Sherlock inhaled deeply to encourage his heart and lungs to return to a normal rate.

As he settled back down into the safety of his chair, he looked back to the wallpaper to check on what portion of his trip he must be on. The wallpaper still shifted interestingly as he stared at it, but the imaginative back story of flowers and ivy was no longer there. He must be starting to come down. He checked his mobile – seven minutes past five in the morning. Yes, definitely well into the come down. Perhaps it would be safest just to stare at the wallpaper until he was fully done.

After an hour, Sherlock checked his mobile again. Only seven minutes had passed. Frustration clawed its way up his throat, making him feel queasy again: why couldn’t he be done now? He’d already learned his lesson earlier from the chair – John was gone and he was processing that. Why did time _have_ to distort now? Why couldn’t this have happened while he was so enchanted with the garden in the wallpaper? He could have stayed there forever. It wasn’t fair.

With an exasperated sigh, Sherlock resorted to what had worked in his university days when his trip didn’t go the way he wanted it to: he went to the window.

The glass itself was fascinating. There were small imperfections – bubbles – in the upper right hand corner. A couple of faint scratches down the center of the glass stood in testimony to the carelessness of the glazier that had installed it after the fake gas explosion several years ago. Mrs. Hudson clearly hadn’t had anything better to do recently, as the window was clean and free of smudges. Sherlock slowly reached out a finger and smeared a line across the clean glass. Much more interesting.

London as it awoke was fascinating. There was so much movement – life, really – as cars began their commute and overzealous health fanatics ran in such a way that they’d develop shin splints in three months. Prim office workers walked purposefully, clutching coffees as though they were armor against their day.

Sherlock watched the city return to life, thinking only about the people who passed by, until the glass was simply transparent again. He checked his mobile hesitantly just in case the time distortion had been more severe than he’d thought: eight forty-nine in the morning.

Sherlock checked his tongue – and the mere fact that he’d had to check for it confirmed that the trip was more or less over. He felt strangely empty: probably hunger. He made his way easily into the kitchen only to stop and belatedly realize that there was no edible food in the flat. No one, not even Mrs. Hudson, had thought to do the shopping as the wedding and all of its attendant details and panic had approached.

Sherlock checked the shelf above the stove just to confirm, but as he had suspected there was also no coffee. He’d drunk it all while composing and no one had thought to replace it yesterday in case he’d needed some today. Frustrated and slightly nauseated (from hunger rather than drugs), he decided just to have tea.

As he reached for the cleanest mug on the drain board, the realization smacked him across the face: there was no one to make tea for him. No one to do the shopping. No Mrs. Hudson and now, officially, no John. Sherlock gripped the edge of the countertop, letting his knuckles turn white and throb, waiting for the feelings to pass. The water took an unbearably long time to boil and the tea an unimaginable amount of time to steep. It was all so tedious: it was why he never made his own tea.

Slowly, finally feeling the exhaustion of the wedding and the end of the LSD overtake him, Sherlock took his mug of tea back to his chair. He realized as he took a careful sip that he now had a perfectly unhindered view of his empty kitchen. Better though the open kitchen than the permanently vacant chair, he thought darkly.

The flat wasn’t silent anymore – the ambient noise of London living trickled through the insulation – but it was achingly empty. The absence of John’s chair had opened the flat wide (although, logically, it had always been this size) and Sherlock felt oddly and uncomfortably small.

Mrs. Hudson – along with his violin and, if he did it right, a sympathetic meal - would be home in a couple of hours. Tucking his feet protectively, cat-like, under himself, Sherlock stared into the kitchen and decided to wait. 

**Author's Note:**

> The title, for an added dose of allusion, is from “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”.


End file.
